Factorio Dev Tracker

Release plans Klonan

This week we released version 0.17.79, and marked it stable. Internally we have been calling this 'Stable 3', and the main feature was the new tooltips we showed in ...

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1.0 date kovarex

Hello,
we feel that the Factorio development is taking way too long. The approach "It is done when it is done" was serving us well to deliver a high quality product, but if we continued this way, we would be doing it basically forever. A lot of us don't have any problem working on Factorio for some more time, but the main problem is, that we would like to introduce new features and content instead of just polishing parts that are already present in the game. We also considered, that the game is quite polished now, and if we just pushed the button to release 1.0, it wouldn't be a catastrophe. From our perspective, a lot of things wouldn't be finished, but from the perspective of a new player, the things we are working on now are mainly nitpicks.

With this in mind, we decided to just specify a 1.0 release date publicly, so we have to stick with it. We will just focus on the most important aspects as we approach the date, and we just do whatev...

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Color correction Albert, V453000

Factorio is in a state that even though is not yet finished, it is very close to its 1.0 version. That means that most of the work is done and we are polishing the game in order to make it bright. That's what we've been doing for the past 2 weeks. Literally making it bright.

Since years I wanted to do this post-production work. But I didn't dare to do it until most of the graphics were finished. I was afraid of breaking the consistency of the look and our production pipeline.
Now it's different. There's only a couple of entities to re-design and some other stuff to do, but in general this missing details are not affecting the possibility of working in the post-production.

Factorio is a dark game. I mean conceptually. All these things about industrializing a planet, polluting an entire world just for the sake of the factory, and killing all its inhabitants are not precisely happy concepts full of lig...

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Hello,
There is a bit of a cold/flu going around the office, but it isn't severe enough to dampen our spirits (I don't like the daylight savings though).

New T-shirts Jitka, Albert, Aleš, Klonan

Ever since we launched the classic Grey T-shirt back in November 2017, we've been asked when we're going to have more designs. Over the last few months Jitka, Albert, and Aleš, have been working on our new collection, which is now available.

Check out our store page for full product details.

We chose the Inserter and the Electronic circuit, as we feel that they are some of the i...

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Hello,
we just released 0.17.73, with 0.17.74 coming very soon. This is just some bug fixes and further pathfinding improvements, and we hope to be able to mark the release as Stable next week.

The new tooltips Twinsen

As part of our big GUI update, I've been working on one particular part: the tooltips. We worked not only on updating the style, but also how the information is structured and sorted, added missing information, removed irrelevant information. This concerns entity, item and recipe tooltips, but almost all tooltips were touched one way or another. Many things were changed. I will go through some of the more important changes.

The new look

First thing to see is the new style Albert has worked on. They now have the same general style as the technology tooltips. We tried to keep them as compact as possible, as sometimes there is quite a lot of...

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New pathfinding algorithm Oxyd

Last week we mentioned the change to make biters not collide with each other, but that wasn’t the only biter-related update we released this past week. Somewhat coincidentally, this week’s updates have included something I’d been working on for a few weeks before – an upgrade to the enemy pathfinding system.

Pathfinding

When a unit wants to go somewhere, it first needs to figure out how to get there. That could be as simple as going straight to its goal, but there can be obstacles – such as cliffs, trees, spawners, player entities – in the way. To do that, it will tell the pathfinder its current position and the goal position, and the pathfinder will – possibly after many ticks – reply with a path, which is simply a series of waypoints for the unit to follow in order to get to its destination.

To do its job, the pathfinder uses an algorithm called A* (pronounced 'A star'). A simple example of A* pa...

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Map editor Lua snippets wheybags

In the last few weeks, we've really accelerated our work on the campaign. We've been pushing ahead a lot with both the scripting and blocking out the physical level design. One of the problems we've come up against a lot, is that we often need to perform custom edits to the map, which are quite tedious, but not common enough to add a new tool to the map editor for them. For example, something like "disable all the spawners in this region".

This kind of problem is easily solved with a little bit of custom Lua code, but getting the specification of the area we want to edit into Lua is a painful process of noting down and typing out location coordinates. It is also easy to lose track of these Lua snippets, as there is no good place to save them.

To solve this problem, we decided to add a Lua snippet tool to the map editor. This tool will let you drag your cursor over an area, and it will then run your custom Lua code on th...

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New test servers

We recently bought and assembled some high-end PCs, with the hope to gauge performance, speed up running tests, and potentially consolidate the number of servers we are maintaining internally. The two lucky CPUs were a i9-9980XE 18-core and a Ryzen 3900X 12-core.

We are using the time to complete our test suite in 'heavy mode' as a benchmark. Heavy mode basically saves and reloads the game each tick, and compares a CRC of the map from before and after. It is super slow to run, but the heavy test is critical to help find any possible determinism issues. There is some more info on 'heavy mode' in ...

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Hello,
technically this post is the Pi Friday Facts, but unfortunately we can't think of anything special to do... maybe someone can make a Combinator cake... that can calculate Pi?

0.17 stable Klonan

We released 0.17.69 as stable this Tuesday. It seems it all went very smoothly, no avalanche of crashes, and only a handful of technical support emails about updating video drivers.

Click to view full resolution

Apart from stable, essentially no development work has happened this week; nearly everyone is on vacation (I am even writing this as I sit in the airport waiting to fly to London for a wedding). We're hoping that at the start of next week, with all the relaxation over, and the pressure of stable off our shoulders, w...

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Click to view full resolution

It has been 6 months and nearly 70 releases since we first launched 0.17 to the world. Now is the time to let it be enjoyed by all the players of the game. We are going to be continuing our work on 0.17 over the next few months, with small experimental releases of new features, and finishing all the GUI reworks.

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New map editor

The new map editor can be accessed directly in-game with the /editor command. Packed with new features and improvements, such as cloning tools, multiple surface support, and time control. The new editor also allows collaborative map e...

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Hello,
We have had quite a peaceful week here in the office.

Last night we went out for a burger and a beer as a last meal with Ernestas before he flies back home for another few months. It was also quite nostalgic, as we went to a place that we used to go to frequently near our old office, and the staff still remembered us.

Light at the end of the bug tunnel Klonan

It seems our 'news' of some programmers taking a break made headlines this last week: Work slows on Factorio while a dev “levels his priest” in WoW Classic.
Even though he is still not level 60, Kovarex found some time to f...

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Fluid mixing saga Dominik

Hello Factorians,

Today I would like to talk to you about my favourite subject - fluid mixing and its prevention. It is a new mechanic introduced in 0.17 that seemed quite simple at first, but has been giving me nightmares ever since.

A while ago I took on the task of updating the fluid system (...

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Hello,
Another week has elapsed, which brings us another week deeper into the declining weather of autumn.

Even more Remnants Albert, Dom, V453000

In ...

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A few bugs left...

WoW classic has been released, which means several of our top men have taken time off to spend hours raiding and having fun in Azeroth.

This isn't great timing, as a few new bugs related to train signals appeared. We want to get these bugs solved before we do another release (another stable candidate). As it turns out, the only person with the skillset to fix these specific train signal bugs is also deep into levelling his Priest... (Kov on Pyrewood Village)

We are still making the rest of the preparations for the stable release. We have started writing up the stable annoucement blog post, and have produced a 0.17 postcard image. Other than the few more critical rail bugs, there doesn't look like there is much else to block the stable release, on the forum we are down to 27 bugs.

Since there are so few bugs left to deal with, some of the team has starting working on 'post-stable' features. Wheybags is working on the new cam...

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The boring phase of bug-fixing is still going, slowly but surely. Stable should be released next week, but with some people on vacation (Ben, Jitka, kovarex, Klonan, Sanqui) and with the release of WoW Classic, it might get slowed down a bit. (By the way, some of us will be playing on Pyrewood Village, Alliance, so if you want to have the chance of meeting Twinsen, kovarex or dominik while leveling, you can join that server).

So since there's not much happening, this week we decided to explore some unpopular or controversial opinions about the game from within the team.

In Wube we don't have a very strict management structure, everyone is free to have ideas and opinions about almost all aspects of the game. This means that with almost every change we argue and discuss a lot before making a final decision. Sometimes we argue about everything, from the smallest GUI change, to how a major feature should work. This is probably not a bad thing since this means change...

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Hello,
we had a party last night in the office to celebrate the work we have done over the last 6 months on 0.17 stablisation. It was nice to have most of the team together to share some beers and pizza.

Not stable quite yet

Unfortunately a couple of nasty bugs appeared this week, in no small part due to forum member boskid and his crusade to find bugs. In the last month alone boskid has reported over 20 bugs, so very special thanks are due. Saying that, we have been efficient in our fixing, and are now down to 32 open bug reports on the forum.

While there are issues being reported, the number of crashes is at an all time low. Below is a comparison between 0.16 and 0.17.

We compared the current number of 0.17 crashes to the number of crashes in 0.16 before we released 0.17. From what we can tell, comparing the number of crashes against average player count...

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Hello,
We had a lovely surprise waiting us this Monday, one of our fans had sent us a delicious cake:

It didn't last very long...

Thank you very much Conn! It certainly helped with the bug fixing push this week.

0.17 Stable candidate Klonan

This last week we have made a big push to fix as many remain...

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Warning this Friday facts is about the Introduction scenario, not about anything that will be in Freeplay Factorio. You may want to read previous FFFs (...

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Lua Mod GUI additions Rseding

Mod GUIs have been an interesting part of Factorio modding since I started working at Wube. They allow scenarios and mods to add GUIs that look and feel like the base game.

When someone new to Factorio modding is introduced to how they function, they almost always have the same questions:

• Why is mod GUI part of the game state?
• Why do mod GUIs need to be deterministic?
• How can I edit the base game GUIs?

And then comes the explanation:

The actual widgets are not part of the game state and are not deterministic. The part that mods have access to however is. In an environment where mods have to operate deterministically, if a mod is allowed to read some data that data must be deterministic. In that simple bit of logic; if a mod can read the checked state of a checkbox then that checked st...

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Hello,
We are down to 28 bugs on the forum. The last bugs are often the ones we have been putting off for a reason, they generally require some more meaningful changes and decisions. That is why this week we have a lot to discuss.

G2A update

G2A got back to us this Monday, nothing much has happened so I will keep it short. They asked if we would agree to an audit to verify the money lost to chargebacks, we said yes, and they said they will start contacting some audit companies, and that it will 'take some time'.

Rail-planner obstacle avoidance

Kovarex was convinced by members of the forum to add someway to use the obstacle avoidance mode of the rail planner. Now when planning a rail path, holding CTRL will make it use the obstacle avoidance ghost planning.

MP server description Sanqui

Dear server owners: the server description field is being enlarged from 120 to 5000 characters, and it now loads immediately. As soon ...

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